Title: Star Maker
Author: Olaf Stapledon
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Title: Star Maker
Author: Olaf Stapledon




PREFACE

AT a moment when Europe is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of
1914 a book like this may be condemned as a distraction from the
desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern barbarism.

Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and
precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more
bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its
own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind.
Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward
militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the
decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of
our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to
frustration.

In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling
at once with courage and with balanced judgment. Some merely shrug their
shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with
their minds closed against the world's most vital issues, inevitably
produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their
contemporaries but also are subtly insincere. For these writers must
consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that
the crisis in human affairs does not exist, or that it is less important
than their own work, or that it is anyhow not their business. But the
crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all. Can
anyone who is at all intelligent and informed hold the contrary without
self-deception?

Yet I have a lively sympathy with some of those "intellectuals" who
declare that they have no useful contribution to make to the struggle,
and therefore had better not dabble in it. I am, in fact, one of them.
In our defense I should say that, though we are inactive or ineffective
as direct supporters of the cause, we do not ignore it. Indeed, it
constantly, obsessively, holds our attention. But we are convinced by
prolonged trial and error that the most useful service open to us is
indirect. For some writers the case is different. Gallantly plunging
into the struggle, they use their powers to spread urgent propaganda, or
they even take up arms in the cause. If they have suitable ability, and
if the particular struggle in which they serve is in fact a part of the
great enterprise of defending (or creating) civilization, they may, of
course, do valuable work. In addition they may gain great wealth of
experience and human sympathy, thereby immensely increasing their
literary power. But the very urgency of their service may tend to blind
them to the importance of maintaining and extending, even in this age of
crisis, what may be called metaphorically the "self-critical
self-consciousness of the human species," or the attempt to see man's
life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the
will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little
human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle
inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan.
They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of cold
assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human
capacities. In their case this is perhaps as it should be; for a
desperate struggle demands less of detachment than of devotion. But some
who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along
with human loyalty, a more dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt
to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all,
increase, not lessen the significance of the present human crisis. It
may also strengthen our charity toward one another.

In this belief I have tried to construct an imaginative sketch of the
dread but vital whole of things. I know well that it is a ludicrously
inadequate and in some ways a childish sketch, even when regarded from
the angle of contemporary human experience. In a calmer and a wiser age
it might well seem crazy. Yet in spite of its crudity, and in spite of
its remoteness, it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant.

At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have
occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I
have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable,
though much damaged words "spiritual" and "worship," which have become
almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the
Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt
to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say,
involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not
in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him
prize them in a new way. The "spiritual life" seems to be in essence the
attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate
to our experience as a whole, just as admiration is felt to be in fact
appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to
an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore
can have a great and beneficial effect on behavior. Indeed, if this
supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of
piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is
a mere sham and a snare.

Before closing this preface I must express my gratitude to Professor L.
C. Martin, Mr. L. H. Myers, and Mr. E. V. Rieu, for much helpful and
sympathetic criticism, in consequence of which I rewrote many chapters.
Even now I hesitate to associate their names with such an extravagant
work. Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In
fact, it is no novel at all.

Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D.
Bernal's fascinating little book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I
hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.

My wife I must thank both for work on the proofs and for being herself.

At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be
helpful to readers unfamiliar with astronomy. The very sketchy time
scales may amuse some.

O. S. March 1937




CHAPTER I

THE EARTH

1. THE STARTING POINT

ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark
heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows,
their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of
dreams. Beyond the sea's level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead,
obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous
and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we
two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for
mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we
planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day's oddities and
vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned.
There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that
roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all
the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either
alone.

All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not
only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic
circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only
at the world's delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.

We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the
upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole
existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in
particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based
fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little
eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on
the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and
no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind
those rapt windows did we, like so many others, indeed live only a
dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our
little life mostly by rote, seldom with clear cognizance, seldom with
firm intent, were products of a sick world.

Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not
spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all
the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb
and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth?
And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own
nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of
active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate,
ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?

I considered "us" with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How
could I describe our relationship even to myself without either
disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of
sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and
independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving
mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all
in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which
the world seeks.

The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a
star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of
years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For
in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our
fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of
the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but
of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified
to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering
beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love,
no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to
the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also
and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable
"us," this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained
basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so
slight a thing.

Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background,
we were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a
commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married
couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in
our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was
doubly suspect.

We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked
at me for a moment with quiet attention; even, I had romantically
imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate,
recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of
adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet
now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a
long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose
trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually
distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as merely
a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on
the whole sensible companions. We left one another a certain freedom,
and so we were able to endure our proximity.

Such was our relationship. Stated thus it did not seem very significant
for the understanding of the universe. Yet in my heart I knew that it
was so. Even the cold stars, even the whole cosmos with all its inane
immensities could not convince me that this, our prized atom of
community, imperfect as it was, short-lived as it must be, was not
significant.

But could this indescribable union of ours really have any significance
at all beyond itself? Did it, for instance, prove that the essential
nature of all human beings was to love, rather than to hate and fear?
Was it evidence that all men and women the world over, though
circumstance might prevent them, were at heart capable of supporting a
world-wide, love-knit community? And further, did it, being itself a
product of the cosmos, prove that love was in some way basic to the
cosmos itself? And did it afford, through its own felt intrinsic
excellence, some guarantee that we two, its frail supporters, must in
some sense have eternal life? Did it, in fact, prove that love was God,
and God was awaiting us in his heaven?

No! Our homely, friendly, exasperating, laughter-making, undecorated
though most prized community of spirit proved none of these things. It
was no certain guarantee of anything but its own imperfect rightness. It
was nothing but a very minute, very bright epitome of one out of the
many potentialities of existence. I remembered the swarms of the
unseeing stars. I remembered the tumult of hate and fear and bitterness
which is man's world. I remembered, too, our own not infrequent
discordancy. And I reminded myself that we should very soon vanish like
the flurry that a breeze has made on still water.

Once more there came to me a perception of the strange contrast of the
stars and us. The incalculable potency of the cosmos mysteriously
enhanced the tightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind's
brief, uncertain venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.

I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat.
In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star
by star.

On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended
beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they
curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little
round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling
in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the
swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and
blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit.
And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its
philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing
hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of
stars.

If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and
there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man's
blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant
tremor, or part of a universal movement!

1. EARTH AMONG THE STARS

Overhead obscurity was gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an
unbroken spread of stars. Two planets stared, unwinking. The more
obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion's
four-square shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the
zigzag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on
the dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I
seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid
rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through
the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth's core of iron; then on
again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the
southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of
the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced awning of day,
and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For
there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay
the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one
hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The
young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the
Milky Way encircled the universe. In a strange vertigo, I looked for
reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still
were; and the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all.
It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass, or of some
more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed
for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled the first stroke.

Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception.
Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jeweled
ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And
though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood
forth as our near neighbors, some brilliant stars were seen to be in
fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because
they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with
swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the
Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through
gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists,
and deep perspectives of stellar populations.

The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a
perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was more. Peering between the
stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of
light, other such vortices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the
void, depth beyond depth, so far afield that even the eye of imagination
could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of
galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare
flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I
seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of
suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet's dark
side a hill, and on that hill myself. For our astronomers assure us that
in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines
of light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered
that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of
imagination, the rays coming thus to me "round" the cosmos would have
revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth,
or perhaps even the Sun, was formed.

But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the
curtained windows of our home, which, though star-pierced, was still
more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with
the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on
which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me an
insubstantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could
neither see nor touch my own flesh. And when I willed to move my limbs,
nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my
body, and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given
way to a vague lightness and exhilaration.

When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I
had died, and was entering some wholly unexpected new existence. Such a
banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I
understood that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized,
concrete atom of community. The violence of my distress shocked me. But
soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably
not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which I might wake at any
minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this
mysterious change. With scientific interest I would observe all that
happened to me.

I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was
shrinking and condensing. The nether stars were no longer visible
through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top,
a broad disc of darkness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring
away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun, formerly
visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically
eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I must have been hundreds of miles
above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and
atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and
a delightful effervescence of thought. The extraordinary brilliance of
the stars excited me. For, whether through the absence of obscuring air,
or through my own increased sensitivity, or both, the sky had taken on
an unfamiliar aspect. Every star had seemingly flared up into higher
magnitude. The heavens blazed. The major stars were like the headlights
of a distant car. The Milky Way, no longer watered down with darkness,
was an encircling, granular river of light.

Presently, along the planet's eastern limb, now far below me, there
appeared a faint line of luminosity; which, as I continued to soar,
warmed here and there to orange and red. Evidently I was traveling not
only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the
sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with its
brilliance. But as I sped on, sun and planet were seen to drift apart,
while the thread of dawn thickened into a misty breadth of sunlight.
This increased, like a visibly waxing moon, till half the planet was
illuminated. Between the areas of night and day, a belt of shade,
warm-tinted, broad as a sub-continent, now marked the area of dawn. As I
continued to rise and travel eastwards, I saw the lands swing westward
along with the day, till I was over the Pacific and high noon. The Earth
appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the
full moon. In its center a dazzling patch of light was the sun's image
reflected in the ocean. The planet's circumference was an indefinite
breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of
space. Much of the northern hemisphere, tilted somewhat toward me, was
an expanse of snow and cloud-tops. I could trace parts of the outlines
of Japan and China, their vague browns and greens indenting the vague
blues and grays of the ocean. Toward the equator, where the air was
clearer, the ocean was dark. A little whirl of brilliant cloud was
perhaps the upper surface of a hurricane. The Philippines and New Guinea
were precisely mapped. Australia faded into the hazy southern limb.

The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was
blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet
surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was
nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its
patterned coloring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the
delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing.
Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the
vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely
yearning to wake.

I reflected that not one of the visible features of this celestial and
living gem revealed the presence of man. Displayed before me, though
invisible, were some of the most congested centers of human population.
There below me lay huge industrial regions, blackening the air with
smoke. Yet all this thronging life and humanly momentous enterprise had
made no mark whatever on the features of the planet. From this high
look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of
man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have
guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering,
self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.



CHAPTER 2

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

WHILE I was thus contemplating my native planet, I continued to soar
through space. The Earth was visibly shrinking into the distance, and as
I raced eastwards, it seemed to be rotating beneath me. All its features
swung westwards, till presently sunset and the Mid-Atlantic appeared
upon its eastern limb, and then the night. Within a few minutes, as it
seemed to me, the planet had become an immense half-moon. Soon it was a
misty, dwindling crescent, beside the sharp and minute crescent of its
satellite.

With amazement I realized that I must be traveling at a fantastic, a
quite impossible rate. So rapid was my progress that I seemed to be
passing through a constant hail of meteors. They were invisible till
they were almost abreast of me; for they shone only by reflected
sunlight, appearing for an instant only, as streaks of light, like lamps
seen from an express train. Many of them I met in head-on collision, but
they made no impression on me. One huge irregular bulk of rock, the size
of a house, thoroughly terrified me. The illuminated mass swelled before
my gaze, displayed for a fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface,
and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me;
but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the middle
distance than I found myself already leaving it behind.

Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the
passage of time was now very confused. Minutes and hours, and perhaps
even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable.

While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already
beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across the thoroughfare of the
asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they
appeared as great stars streaming across the constellations. One or two
revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me.

Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted
its position among the fixed stars. The great globe now appeared as a
disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major
satellites were little pearls floating beside it. The planet's surface
now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds
fogged its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it.
Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night and day merged into
one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its
eastern and unilluminated hemisphere vague areas of ruddy light, which
were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense clouds by volcanic
upheavals.

In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star,
and then was lost in the splendor of the diminished but still blazing
sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon
realized that I must be far beyond the limits of even Pluto's orbit. The
sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me.

At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry
sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, mocked me with their
familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the
other bright stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever
out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was this my punishment
for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate
will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices?

In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hilltop. I saw our home.
The door opened. A figure came out into the garden, lit by the hall
light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went
back into the house. But all this was imagination only. In actuality,
there was nothing but the stars.

After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his
neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were
of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon
me. I was still traveling, and traveling so fast that light itself was
not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took
long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than
they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me
on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as
blue.

Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the
stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead
were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me. Surrounding
the ruby constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round
the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside my course, on
every side, the colors faded into the normal white of the sky's familiar
diamonds. Since I was traveling almost in the plane of the galaxy, the
hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red
behind. Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then
vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven, each hole surrounded
by a zone of colored stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light
from the forward and the hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the
range of my human vision.

As my speed increased, the two starless patches, before and behind, each
with its colored fringe, continued to encroach upon the intervening zone
of normal stars which lay abreast of me on every side. Amongst these I
now detected movement. Through the effect of my own passage the nearer
stars appeared to drift across the background of the stars at greater
distance. This drifting accelerated, till, for an instant, the whole
visible sky was streaked with flying stars. Then everything vanished.
Presumably my speed was so great in relation to the stars that light
from none of them could take normal effect on me.

Though I was now perhaps traveling faster than light itself, I seemed to
be floating at the bottom of a deep and stagnant well. The featureless
darkness, the complete lack of all sensation, terrified me, if I may
call "terror" the repugnance and foreboding which I now experienced
without any of the bodily accompaniments of terror, without any
sensation of trembling, sweating, gasping or palpitation. Forlornly, and
with self-pity, I longed for home, longed to see once more the face that
I knew best. With the mind's eye I could see her now, sitting by the
fire sewing, a little furrow of anxiety between her brows. Was my body,
I wondered, lying dead on the heather? Would they find it there in the
morning? How would she confront this great change in her life? Certainly
with a brave face; but she would suffer.

But even while I was desperately rebelling against the dissolution of
our treasured atom of community, I was aware that something within me,
the essential spirit within me, willed very emphatically not to retreat
but to press on with this amazing voyage. Not that my longing for the
familiar human world could for a moment be counterbalanced by the mere
craving for adventure. I was of too home-keeping a kind to seek serious
danger and discomfort for their own sake. But timidity was overcome by a
sense of the opportunity that fate was giving me, not only to explore
the depths of the physical universe, but to discover what part life and
mind were actually playing among the stars. A keen hunger now took
possession of me, a hunger not for adventure but for insight into the
significance of man, or of any manlike beings in the cosmos. This homely
treasure of ours, this frank and spring-making daisy beside the arid
track of modern life, impelled me to accept gladly my strange adventure;
for might I not discover that the whole universe was no mere place of
dust and ashes with here and there a stunted life, but actually beyond
the parched terrestrial waste land, a world of flowers?

Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the
cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many
million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the
universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man's true
function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or
was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the
cosmos? These grave questions I would answer. Also I must learn to see a
little more clearly and confront a little more rightly (so I put it to
myself) that which, when we glimpse it at all, compels our worship.

I now seemed to my self-important self to be no isolated individual,
craving aggrandizement, but rather an emissary of mankind, no, an organ
of exploration, a feeler, projected by the living human world to make
contact with its fellows in space. At all cost I must go forward, even
if my trivial earthly life must come to an untimely end, and my wife and
children be left without me. I must go forward; and somehow, some day,
even if after centuries of interstellar travel, I must return.

When I look back on that phase of exaltation, now that I have indeed
returned to earth after the most bewildering adventures, I am dismayed
at the contrast between the spiritual treasure which I aspired to hand
over to my fellow men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure
was perhaps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the
challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret reservations.
Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recognize, dimmed the brightness
of my will. My resolution, so boldly formed, proved after all frail. My
unsteady courage often gave place to yearnings for my native planet.
Over and over again in the course of my travels I had a sense that,
owing to my timid and pedestrian nature, I missed the most significant
aspects of events.

Of all that I experienced on my travels, only a fraction was clearly
intelligible to me even at the time; and then, as I shall tell, my
native powers were aided by beings of superhuman development. Now that I
am once more on my native planet, and this aid is no longer available, I
cannot recapture even so much of the deeper insight as I formerly
attained. And so my record, which tells of the most far-reaching of all
human explorations, turns out to be after all no more reliable than the
rigmarole of any mind unhinged by the impact of experience beyond its
comprehension.

To return to my story. How long I spent in debate with myself I do not
know, but soon after I had made my decision, the absolute darkness was
pierced once more by the stars. I was apparently at rest, for stars were
visible in every direction, and their color was normal.

But a mysterious change had come over me. I soon discovered that, by
merely willing to approach a star, I could set myself in motion toward
it, and at such a speed that I must have traveled much faster than
normal light. This, as I knew very well, was physically impossible.
Scientists had assured me that motion faster than the speed of light was
meaningless. I inferred that my motion must therefore be in some manner
a mental, not a physical phenomenon, that I was enabled to take up
successive viewpoints without physical means of locomotion. It seemed to
me evident, too, that the light with which the stars were now revealed
to me was not normal, physical light; for I noticed that my new and
expeditious means of travel took no effect upon the visible colors of
the stars. However fast I moved, they retained their diamond hues,
though all were somewhat brighter and more tinted than in normal vision.

No sooner had I made sure of my new power of locomotion than I began
feverishly to use it. I told myself that I was embarking on a voyage of
astronomical and metaphysical research; but already my craving for the
Earth was distorting my purpose. It turned my attention unduly toward
the search for planets, and especially for planets of the terrestrial
type.

At random I directed my course toward one of the brighter of the near
stars. So rapid was my advance that certain lesser and still nearer
luminaries streamed past me like meteors. I swung close to the great
sun, insensitive to its heat. On its mottled surface, in spite of the
pervading brilliance, I could see, with my miraculous vision, a group of
huge dark sun-spots, each one a pit into which a dozen Earths could have
been dropped. Round the star's limb the excrescences of the chromosphere
looked like fiery trees and plumes and prehistoric monsters, atiptoe or
awing, all on a globe too small for them. Beyond these the pale corona
spread its films into the darkness. As I rounded the star in hyperbolic
flight I searched anxiously for planets, but found none. I searched
again, meticulously, tacking and veering near and far. In the wider
orbits a small object like the earth might easily be overlooked. I found
nothing but meteors and a few insubstantial comets. This was the more
disappointing because the star seemed to be of much the same type as the
familiar sun. Secretly I had hoped to discover not merely planets but
actually the Earth.

Once more I struck out into the ocean of space, heading for another near
star. Once more I was disappointed. I approached yet another lonely
furnace. This too was unattended by the minute grains that harbor life.

I now hurried from star to star, a lost dog looking for its master. I
rushed hither and thither, intent on finding a sun with planets, and
among those planets my home. Star after star I searched, but far more I
passed impatiently, recognizing at once that they were too large and
tenuous and young to be Earth's luminary. Some were vague ruddy giants
broader than the orbit of Jupiter; some, smaller and more definite, had
the brilliance of a thousand suns, and their color was blue. I had been
told that our Sun was of average type, but I now discovered many more of
the great youngsters than of the shrunken, yellowish middle-aged.
Seemingly I must have strayed into a region of late stellar
condensation.

I noticed, but only to avoid them, great clouds of dust, huge as
constellations, eclipsing the star-streams; and tracts of palely glowing
gas, shining sometimes by their own light, sometimes by the reflected
light of stars. Often these nacrous cloud-continents had secreted within
them a number of vague pearls of light, the embryos of future stars. I
glanced heedlessly at many star-couples, trios, and quartets, in which
more or less equal partners waltz in close union. Once, and once only, I
came on one of those rare couples in which one partner is no bigger than
a mere Earth, but massive as a whole great star, and very brilliant. Up
and down this region of the galaxy I found here and there a dying star,
somberly smoldering; and here and there the encrusted and extinguished
dead. These I could not see till I was almost upon them, and then only
dimly, by the reflected light of the whole heaven. I never approached
nearer to them than I could help, for they were of no interest to me in
my crazy yearning for the Earth. Moreover, they struck a chill into my
mind, prophesying the universal death. I was comforted, however, to find
that as yet there were so few of them.

I found no planets. I knew well that the birth of planets was due to the
close approach of two or more stars, and that such accidents must be
very uncommon. I reminded myself that stars with planets must be as rare
in the galaxy as gems among the grains of sand on the sea-shore. What
chance had I of coming upon one? I began to lose heart. The appalling
desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely
pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole
universe, hideously oppressed me. And now, an added distress, my power
of locomotion began to fail. Only with a great effort could I move at
all among the stars, and then but slowly, and ever more slowly. Soon I
should find myself pinned fast in space like a fly in a collection; but
lonely, eternally alone. Yes, surely this was my special Hell.

I pulled myself together. I reminded myself that even if this was to be
my fate, it was no great matter. The Earth could very well do without
me. And even if there was no other living world anywhere in the cosmos,
still, the Earth itself had life, and might wake to far fuller life. And
even though I had lost my native planet, still, that beloved world was
real. Besides, my whole adventure was a miracle, and by continued
miracle might I not stumble on some other Earth? I remembered that I had
undertaken a high pilgrimage, and that I was man's emissary to the
stars.

With returning courage my power of locomotion returned. Evidently it
depended on a vigorous and self-detached mentality. My recent mood of
self-pity and earthward-yearning had hampered it.

Resolving to explore a new region of the galaxy, where perhaps there
would be more of the older stars and a greater hope of planets, I headed
in the direction of a remote and populous cluster. From the faintness of
the individual members of this vaguely speckled ball of light I guessed
that it must be very far afield. On and on I traveled in the darkness.
As I never turned aside to search, my course through the ocean of space
never took me near enough to any star to reveal it as a disc. The lights
of heaven streamed remotely past me like the lights of distant ships.
After a voyage during which I lost all measure of time I found myself in
a great desert, empty of stars, a gap between two star-streams, a cleft
in the galaxy. The Milky Way surrounded me, and in all directions lay
the normal dust of distant stars; but there were no considerable lights,
save the thistle-down of the remote cluster which was my goal.

This unfamiliar sky disturbed me with a sense of my increasing
dissociation from my home. It was almost a comfort to note, beyond the
furthest stars of our galaxy, the minute smudges that were alien
galaxies, incomparably more distant than the deepest recesses of the
Milky Way; and to be reminded that, in spite of all my headlong and
miraculous traveling, I was still within my native galaxy, within the
same little cell of the cosmos where she, my life's friend, still lived.
I was surprised, by the way, that so many of the alien galaxies appeared
to the naked eye, and that the largest was a pale, cloudy mark bigger
than the moon in the terrestrial sky.

By contrast with the remote galaxies, on whose appearance all my
voyaging failed to make impression, the star-cluster ahead of me was now
visibly expanding. Soon after I had crossed the great emptiness between
the star-streams, my cluster confronted me as a huge cloud of
brilliants. Presently I was passing through a more populous area, and
then the cluster itself opened out ahead of me, covering the whole
forward sky with its congested lights. As a ship approaching port
encounters other craft, so I came upon and passed star after star. When
I had penetrated into the heart of the cluster, I was in a region far
more populous than any that I had explored. On every side the sky blazed
with suns, many of which appeared far brighter than Venus in the Earth's
sky. I felt the exhilaration of a traveler who, after an ocean crossing,
enters harbors by night and finds himself surrounded by the lights of a
metropolis. In this congested region, I told myself, many close
approaches must have occurred, many planetary systems must have been
formed. Once more I looked for middle-aged stars of the sun's type. All
that I had passed hitherto were young giants, great as the whole solar
system. After further searching I found a few likely stars, but none had
planets. I found also many double and triple stars, describing their
incalculable orbits; and great continents of gas, in which new stars
were condensing. At last, at last I found a planetary system. With
almost insupportable hope I circled among these worlds; but all were
greater than Jupiter, and all were molten. Again I hurried from star to
star. I must have visited thousands, but all in vain. Sick and lonely I
fled out of the cluster. It dwindled behind me into a ball of down,
sparkling with dew-drops. In front of me a great tract of darkness
blotted out a section of the Milky Way and the neighboring area of
stars, save for a few near lights which lay between me and the obscuring
opacity. The billowy edges of this huge cloud of gas or dust were
revealed by the glancing rays of bright stars beyond it. The sight moved
me with self-pity; on so many nights at home had I seen the edges of
dark clouds silvered just so by moonlight. But the cloud which now
opposed me could have swallowed not merely whole worlds, not merely
countless planetary systems, but whole constellations.

Once more my courage failed me. Miserably I tried to shut out the
immensities by closing my eyes. But I had neither eyes nor eyelids. I
was a disembodied, wandering view-point. I tried to conjure up the
little interior of my home, with the curtains drawn and the fire
dancing. I tried to persuade myself that all this horror of darkness and
distance and barren incandescence was a dream, that I was dozing by the
fire, that at any moment I might wake, that she would reach over from
her sewing and touch me and smile. But the stars still held me prisoner.

Again, though with failing strength, I set about my search. And after I
had wandered from star to star for a period that might have been days or
years or aeons, luck or some guardian spirit directed me to a certain
sun-like star; and looking outwards from this center, I caught sight of
a little point of light, moving, with my movement, against the patterned
sky.  As I leapt toward it, I saw another, and another. Here was indeed
a planetary system much like my own. So obsessed was I with human
standards that I sought out at once the most earth-like of these worlds.
And amazingly earth-like it appeared, as its disc swelled before me, or
below me. Its atmosphere was evidently less dense than ours, for the
outlines of unfamiliar continents and oceans were very plainly visible.

As on the earth, the dark sea brilliantly reflected the sun's image.
White cloud-tracts lay here and there over the seas and the lands,
which, as on my own planet, were mottled green and brown. But even from
this height I saw that the greens were more vivid and far more blue than
terrestrial vegetation. I noted, also, that on this planet there was
less ocean than land, and that the centers of the great continents were
chiefly occupied by dazzling creamy-white deserts.



CHAPTER 3

THE OTHER EARTH

1. ON THE OTHER EARTH

AS I slowly descended toward the surface of the little planet, I found
myself searching for a land which promised to be like England. But no
sooner did I realize what I was doing than I reminded myself that
conditions here would be entirely different from terrestrial conditions,
and that it was very unlikely that I should find intelligent beings at
all. If such beings existed, they would probably be quite
incomprehensible to me. Perhaps they would be huge spiders or creeping
jellies. How could I hope ever to make contact with such monsters?

After circling about at random for some time over the filmy clouds and
the forests, over the dappled plains and prairies and the dazzling
stretches of desert, I selected a maritime country in the temperate
zone, a brilliantly green peninsula. When I had descended almost to the
ground, I was amazed at the verdure of the country-side. Here
unmistakably was vegetation, similar to ours in essential character, but
quite unfamiliar in detail. The fat, or even bulbous, leaves reminded me
of our desert-flora, but here the stems were lean and wiry. Perhaps the
most striking character of this vegetation was its color, which was a
vivid blue-green, like the color of vineyards that have been treated
with copper salts. I was to discover later that the plants of this world
had indeed learnt to protect themselves by means of copper sulphate from
the microbes and the insect-like pests which formerly devastated this
rather dry planet.

I skimmed over a brilliant prairie scattered with Prussian blue bushes.
The sky also attained a depth of blue quite unknown on earth, save at
great altitudes. There were a few low yet cirrus clouds, whose feathery
character I took to be due to the tenuousness of the atmosphere. This
was borne out by the fact that, though my descent had taken place in the
forenoon of a summer's day, several stars managed to pierce the almost
nocturnal sky. All exposed surfaces were very intensely illuminated. The
shadows of the nearer bushes were nearly black. Some distant objects,
rather like buildings, but probably mere rocks, appeared to be blocked
out in ebony and snow. Altogether the landscape was one of unearthly and
fantastical beauty.

I glided with wingless flight over the surface of the planet, through
glades, across tracts of fractured rock, along the banks of streams.
Presently I came to a wide region covered by neat, parallel rows of
fern-like plants, bearing masses of nuts on the lower surfaces of their
leaves. It was almost impossible to believe that this vegetable
regimentation had not been intelligently planned. Or could it after all
be merely a natural phenomenon not known on my own planet? Such was my
surprise that my power of locomotion, always subject to emotional
interference, now began to fail me. I reeled in the air like a drunk
man. Pulling myself together, I staggered on over the ranked crops
toward a rather large object which lay some distance from me beside a
strip of bare ground. Presently, to my amazement, my stupefaction, this
object revealed itself as a plow. It was rather a queer instrument, but
there was no mistaking the shape of the blade, which was rusty, and
obviously made of iron. There were two iron handles, and chains for
attachment to a beast of burden. It was difficult to believe that I was
many light-years distant from England. Looking round, I saw an
unmistakable cart track, and a bit of dirty ragged cloth hanging on a
bush. Yet overhead was the unearthly sky, full noon with stars.

I followed the lane through a little wood of queer bushes, whose large
fat drooping leaves had cherry-like fruits along their edges. Suddenly,
round a bend in the lane, I came upon a man. Or so at first he seemed to
my astounded and star-weary sight. I should not have been so surprised
by the strangely human character of this creature had I at this early
stage understood the forces that controlled my adventure. Influences
which I shall later describe doomed me to discover first such worlds as
were most akin to my own. Meanwhile the reader may well conceive my
amazement at this strange encounter. I had always supposed that man was
a unique being. An inconceivably complex conjunction of circumstances
had produced him, and it was not to be supposed that such conditions
would be repeated anywhere in the universe. Yet here, on the very first
globe to be explored, was an obvious peasant. Approaching him, I saw
that he was not quite so like terrestrial man as he seemed at a
distance; but he was a man for all that. Had God, then, peopled the
whole universe with our kind? Did he perhaps in very truth make us in
his image? It was incredible. To ask such questions proved that I had
lost my mental balance.

As I was a mere disembodied view-point, I was able to observe without
being observed. I floated about him as he strode along the lane. He was
an erect biped and in general plan definitely human. I had no means of
judging his height, but he must have been approximately of normal
terrestrial stature, or at least not smaller than a pigmy and not taller
than a giant. He was of slender build. His legs were almost like a
bird's, and enclosed in rough narrow trousers. Above the waist he was
naked, displaying a disproportionately large thorax, shaggy with
greenish hair. He had two short but powerful arms, and huge shoulder
muscles. His skin was dark and ruddy, and dusted plentifully with bright
green down. All his contours were uncouth, for the details of muscles,
sinews and joints were very plainly different from our own. His neck was
curiously long and supple. His head I can best describe by saying that
most of the brain-pan, covered with a green thatch, seemed to have
slipped backwards and downwards over the nape. His two very human eyes
peered from under the eaves of hair. An oddly projecting, almost
spout-like mouth made him look as though he were whistling. Between the
eyes, and rather above them, was a pair of great equine nostrils which
were constantly in motion. The bridge of the nose was represented by an
elevation in the thatch, reaching from the nostrils backwards over the
top of the head. There were no visible ears. I discovered later that the
auditory organs opened into the nostrils.

Clearly, although evolution on this Earth-like planet must have taken a
course on the whole surprisingly like that which had produced my own
kind, there must also have been many divergencies.

The stranger wore not only boots but gloves, seemingly of tough leather.
His boots were extremely short. I was to discover later that the feet of
this race, the "Other Men," as I called them, were rather like the feet
of an ostrich or a camel. The instep consisted of three great toes grown
together. In place of the heel there was an additional broad, stumpy
toe. The hands were without palms. Each was a bunch of three gristly
fingers and a thumb.

The aim of this book is not to tell of my own adventures but to give
some idea of the worlds which I visited. I shall therefore not recount
in detail how I established myself among the Other Men. Of myself it is
enough to say a few words. When I had studied this agriculturalist for a
while, I began to be strangely oppressed by his complete unawareness, of
myself. With painful clearness I realized that the purpose of my
pilgrimage was not merely scientific observation, but also the need to
effect some kind of mental and spiritual traffic with other worlds, for
mutual enrichment and community. How should I ever be able to achieve
this end unless I could find some means of communication? It was not
until I had followed my companion to his home, and had spent many days
in that little circular stone house with roof of mudded wicker, that I
discovered the power of entering into his mind, of seeing through his
eyes, sensing through all his sense organs, perceiving his world just as
he perceived it, and following much of his thought and his emotional
life. Not till very much later, when I had passively "inhabited" many
individuals of the race, did I discover how to make my presence known,
and even to converse inwardly with my host.

This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in
all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But
in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host
with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality,
my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the
other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special
act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.

It can well be understood that at first I found these alien minds quite
unintelligible. Their very sensations differed from my familiar
sensations in important respects. Their thoughts and all their emotions
and sentiments were strange to me. The traditional groundwork of these
minds, their most familiar concepts, were derived from a strange
history, and expressed in languages which to the terrestrial mind were
subtly misleading.

I spent on the Other Earth many "other years," wandering from mind to
mind and country to country, but I did not gain any clear understanding
of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history
till I had encountered one of their philosophers, an aging but still
vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had prevented him
from attaining eminence. Most of my hosts, when they became aware of 'my
presence within them, regarded me either as an evil spirit or as a
divine messenger. The more sophisticated, however, assumed that I was a
mere disease, a symptom of insanity in themselves. They therefore
promptly applied to the local "Mental Sanitation Officer." After I had
spent, according to the local calendar, a year or so of bitter
loneliness among minds who refused to treat me as a human being, I had
the good fortune to come under the philosopher's notice. One of my
hosts, who complained of suffering from "voices," and visions of
"another world," appealed to the old man for help. Bvalltu, for such
approximately was the philosopher's name, the "11" being pronounced more
or less as in Welsh, Bvalltu effected a "cure" by merely inviting me to
accept the hospitality of his own mind, where, he said, he would very
gladly entertain me. It was with extravagant joy that I made contact at
last with a being who recognized in me a human personality.

2. A BUSY WORLD

So many important characteristics of this world-society need to be
described that I cannot spend much time on the more obvious features of
the planet and its race. Civilization had reached a stage of growth much
like that which was familiar to me. I was constantly surprised by the
blend of similarity and difference. Traveling over the planet I found
that cultivation had spread over most of the suitable areas, and that
industrialism was already far advanced in many countries. On the
prairies huge flocks of mammal-like creatures grazed and scampered.
Larger mammals, or quasi-mammals, were farmed on all the best pasture
land for food and leather. I say "quasi-mammal" because, though these
creatures were viviparous, they did not suckle. The chewed cud,
chemically treated in the maternal belly, was spat into the offspring's
mouth as a jet of pre-digested fluid. It was thus also that human
mothers fed their young.

The most important means of locomotion on the Other Earth was the
steam-train, but trains in this world were so bulky that they looked
like whole terraces of houses on the move. This remarkable railway
development was probably due to the great number and length of journeys
across deserts. Occasionally I traveled on steam-ships on the few and
small oceans, but marine transport was on the whole backward. The screw
propeller was unknown, its place being taken by paddle wheels.
Internal-combustion engines were used in road and desert transport.
Flying, owing to the rarified atmosphere, had not been achieved; but
rocket-propulsion was already used for long-distance transport of mails,
and for long-range bombardment in war. Its application to aeronautics
might come any day.

My first visit to the metropolis of one of the great empires of the
Other Earth was an outstanding experience. Everything was at once so
strange and so familiar. There were streets and many-windowed stores and
offices. In this old city the streets were narrow, and so congested was
the motor traffic that pedestrians were accommodated on special elevated
tracks slung beside the first-story windows and across the streets.

The crowds that streamed along these footpaths were as variegated as our
own. The men wore cloth tunics, and trousers surprisingly like the
trousers of Europe, save that the crease affected by the respectable was
at the side of the leg. The women, breastless and high-nostriled like
the men, were to be distinguished by their more tubular lips, whose
biological function it was to project food for the infant. In place of
skirts they disported green and glossy silk tights and little gawdy
knickers. To my unaccustomed vision the effect was inexpressibly vulgar.
In summer both sexes often appeared in the streets naked to the waist;
but they always wore gloves.

Here, then, was a host of persons who, in spite of their oddity, were as
essentially human as Londoners. They went about their private affairs
with complete assurance, ignorant that a spectator from another world
found them one and all grotesque, with their lack of forehead, their
great elevated quivering nostrils, their startlingly human eyes, their
spout-like mouths. There they were, alive and busy, shopping, staring,
talking. Children dragged at their mothers' hands. Old men with white
facial hair bowed over walking-stocks. Young men eyed young women. The
prosperous were easily to be distinguished from the unfortunate by their
newer and richer clothes, their confident and sometimes arrogant
carriage.

How can I describe in a few pages the distinctive character of a whole
teeming and storied world, so different from my own, yet so similar?
Here, as on my own planet, infants were being born every hour. Here, as
there, they clamored for food, and very soon for companionship. They
discovered what pain was, and what fear, and what loneliness, and love.
They grew up, molded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows,
to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled,
bitter, unwittingly vindictive. One and all they desperately craved the
bliss of true community; and very few, fewer here, perhaps, than in my
own world, found more than the vanishing flavor of it. They howled with
the pack and hounded with the pack. Starved both physically and
mentally, they brawled over the quarry and tore one another to pieces,
mad with hunger, physical or mental. Sometimes some of them paused and
asked what it was all for; and there followed a battle of words, but no
clear answer. Suddenly they were old and finished. Then, the span from
birth to death being an imperceptible instant of cosmical time, they
vanished.

This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a
race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a
different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated
as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo sapiens. All the
modes and facets of the spirit manifested in our history had their
equivalents in the history of the Other Men. As with us, there had
been dark ages and ages of brilliance, phases of advancement and of
retreat, cultures predominantly material, and others in the main
intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual. There were "Eastern" races and
"Western" races. There were empires, republics, dictatorships. Yet all
was different from the terrestrial. Many of the differences, of course,
were superficial; but there was also an underlying, deep-lying
difference which I took long to understand and will not yet describe. I
must begin by speaking of the biological equipment of the Other Men.
Their animal nature was at bottom much like ours. They responded with
anger, fear, hate, tenderness, curiosity, and so on, much as we respond.
In sensory equipment they were not unlike ourselves, save that in vision
they were less sensitive to color and more to form than is common with
us. The violent colors of the Other Earth appeared to me through the
eyes of its natives very subdued. In hearing also they were rather
ill-equipped. Though their auditory organs were as sensitive as ours to
faint sounds, they were poor discriminators. Music, such as we know,
never developed in this world.

In compensation, scent and taste developed amazingly. These beings
tasted not only with their mouths, but with then-moist black hands and
with their feet. They were thus afforded an extraordinarily rich and
intimate experience of their planet. Tastes of metals and woods, of sour
and sweet earths, of the many rocks, and of the innumerable shy or bold
flavors of plants crushed beneath the bare running feet, made up a whole
world unknown to terrestrial man.

The genitals also were equipped with taste organs. There were several
distinctive male and female patterns of chemical characteristics, each
powerfully attractive to the opposite sex. These were savored faintly by
contact of hands or feet with any part of the body, and with exquisite
intensity in copulation.

This surprising richness of gustatory experience made it very difficult
for me to enter fully into the thoughts of the Other Men. Taste played
as important a part in their imagery and conception as sight in our own.
Many ideas which terrestrial man has reached by way of sight, and which
even in their most abstract form still bear traces of their visual
origin, the Other Men conceived in terms of taste. For example, our
"brilliant," as applied to persons or ideas, they would translate by a
word whose literal meaning was "tasty." For "lucid" they would use a
term which in primitive times was employed by hunters to signify an
easily runnable taste-trail. To have "religious illumination" was to
"taste the meadows of heaven." Many of our non-visual concepts also were
rendered by means of taste. "Complexity" was "many flavored," a word
applied originally to the confusion of tastes round a drinking pool
frequented by many kinds of beasts. "Incompatibility" was derived from a
word meaning the disgust which certain human types felt for one another
on account of their flavors.

Differences of race, which in our world are chiefly conceived in terms
of bodily appearance, were for the Other Men almost entirely differences
of taste and smell. And as the races of the Other Men were much less
sharply localized than our own races, the strife between groups whose
flavors were repugnant to one another played a great part in history.
Each race tended to believe that its own flavor was characteristic of
all the finer mental qualities, was indeed an absolutely reliable label
of spiritual worth. In former ages the gustatory and olfactory
differences had, no doubt, been true signs of racial differences; but in
modern times, and in the more developed lands, there had been great
changes. Not only had the races ceased to be clearly localized, but also
industrial civilization had produced a crop of genetic changes which
rendered the old racial distinctions meaningless. The ancient flavors,
however, though they had by now no racial significance at all, and
indeed members of one family might have mutually repugnant flavors,
continued to have the traditional emotional effects. In each country
some particular flavor was considered the true hall-mark of the race of
that country, and all other flavors were despised, if not actually
condemned.

In the country which I came to know best the orthodox racial flavor was
a kind of saltness inconceivable to terrestrial man. My hosts regarded
themselves as the very salt of the earth. But as a matter of fact the
peasant whom I first "inhabited" was the only genuine pure salt man of
orthodox variety whom I ever encountered. The great majority of that
country's citizens attained their correct taste and smell by artificial
means. Those who were at least approximately salt, with some variety of
saltness, though not the ideal variety, were forever exposing the deceit
of their sour, sweet, or bitter neighbors. Unfortunately, though the
taste of the limbs could be fairly well disguised, no effective means
had been found for changing the flavor of copulation. Consequently newly
married couples were apt to make the most shattering discoveries about
one another on the wedding night. Since in the great majority of unions
neither party had the orthodox flavor, both were willing to pretend to
the world that all was well. But often there would turn out to be a
nauseating incompatibility between the two gustatory types. The whole
population was rotten with neuroses bred of these secret tragedies of
marriage. Occasionally, when one party was more or less of the orthodox
flavor, this genuinely salt partner would indignantly denounce the
impostor. The courts, the news bulletins, and the public would then join
in self-righteous protests.

Some "racial" flavors were too obtrusive to be disguised. One in
particular, a kind of bitter-sweet, exposed its possessor to extravagant
persecution in all but the most tolerant countries. In past times the
bitter-sweet race had earned a reputation of cunning and self-seeking,
and had been periodically massacred by its less intelligent neighbors.
But in the general biological ferment of modern times the bitter-sweet
flavor might crop up in any family. Woe, then, to the accursed infant,
and to all its relatives! Persecution was inevitable; unless indeed the
family was wealthy enough to purchase from the state "an honorary
salting" (or in the neighboring land, "an honorary sweetening"), which
removed the stigma.

In the more enlightened countries the whole racial superstition was
becoming suspect. There was a movement among the intelligentsia for
conditioning infants to tolerate every kind of human flavor, and for
discarding the deodorants and degustatants, and even the boots and
gloves, which civilized convention imposed.

Unfortunately this movement of toleration was hampered by one of the
consequences of industrialism. In the congested and unhealthy industrial
centers a new gustatory and olfactory type had appeared, apparently as a
biological mutation. In a couple of generations this sour, astringent,
and undisguisable flavor dominated in all the most disreputable
working-class quarters. To the fastidious palates of the well-to-do, it
was overwhelmingly nauseating and terrifying. In fact it became for them
an unconscious symbol, tapping all the secret guilt and fear and hate
which the oppressors felt for the oppressed.

In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production,
nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled
for private profit by a small minority of the population. These
privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on
pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was
already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers
increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather
than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery
might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing
competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore
wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products
were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad.
Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic
system disintegrated. A familiar story!

As conditions deteriorated, and the movements of charity and
state-charity became less and less able to cope with the increasing mass
of unemployment and destitution, the new pariah-race became more and
more psychologically useful to the hate-needs of the scared, but still
powerful, prosperous. The theory was spread that these wretched beings
were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff
immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were
therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest
conditions of work. When unemployment had become a serious social
problem, practically the whole pariah stock was workless and destitute.
It was of course easily believed that unemployment, far from being due
to the decline of capitalism, was due to the worthlessness of the
pariahs.

At the time of my visit the working class had become tainted through and
through by the pariah stock, and there was a vigorous movement afoot
amongst the wealthy and the official classes to institute slavery for
pariahs and half-pariahs, so that these might be openly treated as the
cattle which in fact they were. In view of the danger of continued
race-pollution, some politicians urged wholesale slaughter of the
pariahs, or, at the least, universal sterilization. Others pointed out
that, as a supply of cheap labor was necessary to society, it would be
wiser merely to keep their numbers down by working them to an early
death in occupations which those of "pure race" would never accept.
This, at any rate, should be done in times of prosperity; but in times
of decline, the excess population could be allowed to starve, or might
be used up in the physiological laboratories.

The persons who first dared to suggest this policy were scourged by the
whips of generous popular indignation. But their policy was in fact
adopted; not explicitly but by tacit consent, and in the absence of any
more constructive plan.

The first time that I was taken through the poorest quarter of the city
I was surprised to see that, though there were large areas of slum
property far more squalid than anything in England, there were also many
great clean blocks of tenements worthy of Vienna. These were surrounded
by gardens, which were crowded with wretched tents and shanties. The
grass was worn away, the bushes damaged, the flowers trampled.
Everywhere men, women, and children, all filthy and ragged, were idling.

I learned that these noble buildings had been erected before the
world-economic-crisis (familiar phrase!) by a millionaire who had made
his money in trading an opium-like drug. He presented the buildings to
the City Council, and was gathered to heaven by way of the peerage. The
more deserving and less unsavory poor were duly housed; but care was
taken to fix the rent high enough to exclude the pariah-race. Then came
the crisis. One by one the tenants failed to pay their rent, and were
ejected. Within a year the buildings were almost empty.

There followed a very curious sequence of events, and one which, as I
was to discover, was characteristic of this strange world. Respectable
public opinion, though vindictive toward the unemployed, was
passionately tender toward the sick. In falling ill, a man acquired a
special sanctity, and exercised a claim over all healthy persons. Thus
no sooner did any of the wretched campers succumb to a serious disease
than he was carried off to be cared for by all the resources of medical
science. The desperate paupers soon discovered how things stood, and did
all in their power to fall sick. So successful were they, that the
hospitals were soon filled. The empty tenements were therefore hastily
fitted out to receive the increasing flood of patients.

Observing these and other farcical events, I was reminded of my own
race. But though the Other Men were in many ways so like us, I suspected
increasingly that some factor still hidden from me doomed them to a
frustration which my own nobler species need never fear. Psychological
mechanisms which in our case are tempered with common sense or moral
sense stood out in this world in flagrant excess. Yet it was not true
that Other Man was less intelligent or less moral than man of my own
species. In abstract thought and practical invention he was at least our
equal. Many of his most recent advances in physics and astronomy had
passed beyond our present attainment. I noticed, however, that
psychology was even more chaotic than with us, and that social thought
was strangely perverted.

In radio and television, for instance, the Other Men were technically
far ahead of us, but the use to which they put their astounding
inventions was disastrous. In civilized countries everyone but the
pariahs carried a pocket receiving set. As the Other Men had no music,
this may seem odd; but since they lacked newspapers, radio was the only
means by which the man in the street could learn the lottery and
sporting results which were his staple mental diet. The place of music,
moreover, was taken by taste- and smell-themes, which were translated
into patterns of ethereal undulation, transmitted by all the great
national stations, and restored to their original form in the pocket
receivers and taste-batteries of the population. These instruments
afforded intricate stimuli to the taste organs and scent organs of the
hand. Such was the power of this kind of entertainment that both men and
women were nearly always seen with one hand in a pocket. A special wave
length had been allotted to the soothing of infants.

A sexual receiving set had been put upon the market, and programs were
broadcast for it in many countries; but not in all. This extraordinary
invention was a combination of radio--touch, taste, odor, and sound. It
worked not through the sense organs, but direct stimulation of the
appropriate brain-centers. The recipient wore a specially constructed
skullcap, which transmitted to him from a remote studio the embraces of
some delectable and responsive woman, as they were then actually being
experienced by a male "love-broadcaster" or as electromagnetically
recorded on a steel tape on some earlier occasion. Controversies had
arisen about the morality of sexual broadcasting. Some countries
permitted programs for males but not for females, wishing to preserve
the innocence of the purer sex. Elsewhere the clerics had succeeded in
crushing the whole project on the score that radio-sex, even for men
alone, would be a diabolical substitute for a certain much desired and
jealously guarded religious experience, called the immaculate union, of
which I shall tell in the sequel. Well did the priests know that their
power depended largely on their ability to induce this luscious ecstasy
in their flock by means of ritual and other psychological techniques.

Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the
cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a
danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder
would decline.

Since in all the more respectable countries broadcasting had been put
under the control of retired soldiers or good churchmen, the new device
was at first adopted only in the more commercial and the more
disreputable states. From their broadcasting stations the embraces of
popular "radio love-stars" and even of impecunious aristocrats were
broadcast along with advertisements of patent medicines, taste-proof
gloves, lottery results, savors, and degustatants.

The principle of radio-brain-stimulation was soon developed much
further. Programs of all the most luscious or piquant experiences were
broadcast in all countries, and could be picked up by simple receivers
that were within the means of all save the pariahs. Thus even the
laborer and the factory hand could have the pleasures of a banquet
without expense and subsequent repletion, the delights of proficient
dancing without the trouble of learning the art, the thrills of
motor-racing without danger. In an ice-bound northern home he could bask
on tropical beaches, and in the tropics indulge in winter sports.
Governments soon discovered that the new invention gave them a cheap and
effective kind of power over their subjects. Slum-conditions could be
tolerated if there was an unfailing supply of illusory luxury. Reforms
distasteful to the authorities could be shelved if they could be
represented as inimical to the national radio-system. Strikes and riots
could often be broken by the mere threat to close down the broadcasting
studios, or alternatively by flooding the ether at a critical moment
with some saccharine novelty.

The fact that the political Left Wing opposed the further development of
radio amusements made Governments and the propertied classes the more
ready to accept it. The Communists, for the dialectic of history on this
curiously earth-like planet had produced a party deserving that name,
strongly condemned the scheme. In their view it was pure Capitalist
dope, calculated to prevent the otherwise inevitable dictatorship of the
proletariat.

The increasing opposition of the Communists made it possible to buy off
the opposition of their natural enemies, the priests and soldiers. It
was arranged that religious services should in future occupy a larger
proportion of broadcasting time, and that a tithe of all licensing fees
should be allocated to the churches. The offer to broadcast the
immaculate union, however, was rejected by the clerics. As an additional
concession it was agreed that all married members of the staffs of
Broadcasting Authorities must, on pain of dismissal, prove that they had
never spent a night away from their wives (or husbands). It was also
agreed to weed out all those B.A. employees who were suspected of
sympathy with such disreputable ideals as pacifism and freedom of
expression. The soldiers were further appeased by a state-subsidy for
maternity, a tax on bachelors, and regular broadcasting of military
propaganda.

During my last years on the Other Earth a system was invented by which a
man could retire to bed for life and spend all his time receiving radio
programs. His nourishment and all his bodily functions were attended to
by doctors and nurses attached to the Broadcasting Authority. In place
of exercise he received periodic massage. Participation in the scheme
was at first an expensive luxury, but its inventors hoped to make it at
no distant date available to all. It was even expected that in time
medical and menial attendants would cease to be necessary. A vast system
of automatic food-production, and distribution of liquid pabulum by
means of pipes leading to the mouths of the recumbent subjects, would be
complemented by an intricate sewage system. Electric massage could be
applied at will by pressing a button. Medical supervision would be
displaced by an automatic endocrine-compensation system. This would
enable the condition of the patient's blood to regulate itself
automatically by tapping from the communal drug-pipes whatever chemicals
were needed for correct physiological balance.

Even in the case of broadcasting itself the human element would no
longer be needed, for all possible experiences would have been already
recorded from the most exquisite living examples. These would be
continuously broadcast in a great number of alternative programs.

A few technicians and organizers might still be needed to superintend
the system; but, properly distributed, their work would entail for each
member of the World Broadcasting Authority's staff no more than a few
hours of interesting activity each week.

Children, if future generations were required, would be produced
ectogenetically. The World Director of Broadcasting would be requested
to submit psychological and physiological specifications of the ideal
"listening breed." Infants produced in accordance with this pattern
would then be educated by special radio programs to prepare them for
adult radio life. They would never leave their cots, save to pass by
stages to the full-sized beds of maturity. At the latter end of life, if
medical science did not succeed in circumventing senility and death, the
individual would at least be able to secure a painless end by pressing
an appropriate button.

Enthusiasm for this astounding project spread rapidly in all civilized
countries, but certain forces of reaction were bitterly opposed to it.
The old-fashioned religious people and the militant nationalists both
affirmed that it was man's glory to be active. The religious held that
only in self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and constant
prayer, could the soul be fitted for eternal life. The nationalists of
each country declared that their own people had been given a sacred
trust to rule the baser kinds, and that in any case only the martial
virtues could ensure the spirit's admittance to Valhalla.

Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored
radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now
turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they
needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial
ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an
opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse
the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact,
the "Other Fascism," complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and
state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal
at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.

Opposed to all these critics of radio-bliss, and equally opposed to
radio-bliss itself, there was in each country a small and bewildered
party which asserted that the true goal of human activity was the
creation of a world-wide community of awakened and intelligently
creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the
common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.
Much of their doctrine was a re-statement of the teachings of religious
seers of a fine long past, but it had also been deeply influenced by
contemporary science. This party, however, was misunderstood by the
scientists, cursed by the clerics, ridiculed by the militarists, and
ignored by the advocates of radio-bliss.

Now at this time economic confusion had been driving the great
commercial empires of the Other Earth into more and more desperate
competition for markets. These economic rivalries had combined with
ancient tribal passions of fear and hate and pride to bring about an
interminable series of war scares each of which threatened universal
Armageddon.

In this situation the radio-enthusiasts pointed out that, if their
policy were accepted, war would never occur, and on the other hand that,
if a world-war broke out, their policy would be indefinitely postponed.
They contrived a worldwide peace movement; and such was the passion for
radio-bliss that the demand for peace swept all countries. An
International Broadcasting Authority was at last founded, to propagate
the radio gospel, compose the differences between the empires, and
eventually to take over the sovereignty of the world.

Meanwhile the earnestly "religious" and the sincere militarists, rightly
dismayed at the baseness of the motives behind the new internationalism,
but in their own manner equally wrong-headed, determined to save the
Other Men in spite of themselves by goading the peoples into war. All
the forces of propaganda and financial corruption were heroically
wielded to foment the passions of nationalism. Even so, the greed for
radio-bliss was by now so general and so passionate, that the war party
would never have succeeded had it not been for the wealth of the great
armorers, and their experience in fomenting strife.

Trouble was successfully created between one of the older commercial
empires and a certain state which had only recently adopted mechanical
civilization, but was already a Great Power, and a Power in desperate
need of markets. Radio, which formerly had been the main force making
for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus
to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was
assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were
plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the
barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every
country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable. A
dispute arose over the control of a frontier province. During those
critical days Bvalltu and I happened to be in a large provincial town. I
shall never forget how the populace plunged into almost maniacal hate.
All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept
away by a savage blood-lust. Panic-stricken governments began projecting
long-range rocket bombs at their dangerous neighbors. Within a few weeks
several of the capitals of the Other Earth had been destroyed from the
air. Each people now began straining every nerve to do more hurt than it
received.

Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of
the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country,
looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the
disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless
military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture
and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there
is no need to speak in detail.

Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which
overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances,
would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely
overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a
scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us,
we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always
manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last
moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself. Not so with the Other Men.

3. PROSPECTS OF THE RACE

The longer I stayed on the Other Earth, the more I suspected that there
must be some important underlying difference between this human race and
my own. In some sense the difference was obviously one of balance. Homo
sapiens was on the whole better integrated, more gifted with common
sense, less apt to fall into extravagance through mental dissociation.

Perhaps the most striking example of the extravagance of the Other Men
was the part played by religion in their more advanced societies.
Religion was a much greater power than on my own planet; and the
religious teachings of the prophets of old were able to kindle even my
alien and sluggish heart with fervor. Yet religion, as it occurred
around me in contemporary society, was far from edifying.

I must begin by explaining that in the development of religion on the
Other Earth gustatory sensation had played a very great part. Tribal
gods had of course been endowed with the taste-characters most moving to
the tribe's own members. Later, when monotheisms arose, descriptions of
God's power, his wisdom, his justice, his benevolence, were accompanied
by descriptions of his taste. In mystical literature God was often
likened to an ancient and mellow wine; and some reports of religious
experience suggested that this gustatory-ecstasy was in many ways akin
to the reverent zest of our own wine-tasters, savoring some rare
vintage.

Unfortunately, owing to the diversity of gustatory human types, there
had seldom been any widespread agreement as to the taste of God.
Religious wars had been waged to decide whether he was in the main sweet
or salt, or whether his preponderant flavor was one of the many
gustatory characters which my own race cannot conceive. Some teachers
insisted that only the feet could taste him, others only the hands or
the mouth, others that he could be experienced only in the subtle
complex of gustatory flavors known as the immaculate union, which was a
sensual, and mainly sexual, ecstasy induced by contemplation of
intercourse with the deity.

Other teachers declared that, though God was indeed tasty, it was not
through any bodily instrument but to the naked spirit that his essence
was revealed; and that his was a flavor more subtle and delicious than
the flavor of the beloved, since it included all that was most fragrant
and spiritual in man, and infinitely more.

Some went so far as to declare that God should be thought of not as a
person at all but as actually being this flavor. Bvalltu used to say,
"Either God is the universe, or he is the flavor of creativity pervading
all things."

Some ten or fifteen centuries earlier, when religion, so far as I could
tell, was most vital, there were no churches or priesthoods; but every
man's life was dominated by religious ideas to an extent which to me was
almost incredible. Later, churches and priesthoods had returned, to play
an important part in preserving what was now evidently a declining
religious consciousness. Still later, a few centuries before the
Industrial Revolution, institutional religion had gained such a hold on
the most civilized peoples that three-quarters of their total income was
spent on the upkeep of religious institutions. The working classes,
indeed, who slaved for the owners in return for a mere pittance, gave
much of their miserable earnings to the priests, and lived in more
abject squalor than need have been.

Science and industry had brought one of those sudden and extreme
revolutions of thought which were so characteristic of the Other Men.
Nearly all the churches were destroyed or turned into temporary
factories or industrial museums. Atheism, lately persecuted, became
fashionable. All the best minds turned agnostic. More recently, however,
apparently in horror at the effects of a materialistic culture which was
far more cynical and blatant than our own, the most industrialized
peoples began to turn once more to religion. A spiritistic foundation
was provided for natural science. The old churches were re-sanctified,
and so many new religious edifices were built that they were soon as
plentiful as cinema houses with us. Indeed, the new churches gradually
absorbed the cinema, and provided non-stop picture shows in which
sensual orgies and ecclesiastical propaganda were skilfully blended.

At the time of my visit the churches had regained all their lost power.
Radio had indeed at one time competed with them, but was successfully
absorbed. They still refused to broadcast the immaculate union, which
gained fresh prestige from the popular belief that it was too spiritual
to be transmitted on the ether. The more advanced clerics, however, had
agreed that if ever the universal system of "radio-bliss" was
established, this difficulty might be overcome. Communism, meanwhile,
still maintained its irreligious convention; but in the two great
Communist countries the officially organized "irreligion" was becoming a
religion in all but name. It had its institutions, its priesthood, its
ritual, its morality, its system of absolution, its metaphysical
doctrines, which, though devoutly materialistic, were none the less
superstitious. And the flavor of deity had been displaced by the flavor
of the proletariat.

Religion, then, was a very real force in the life of all these peoples.
But there was something puzzling about their devoutness. In a sense it
was sincere, and even beneficial; for in very small personal temptations
and very obvious and stereotyped moral choices, the Other Men were far
more conscientious than my own kind. But I discovered that the typical
modern Other Man was conscientious only in conventional situations, and
that in genuine moral sensibility he was strangely lacking. Thus, though
practical generosity and superficial comradeship were more usual than
with us, the most diabolic mental persecution was perpetrated with a
clear conscience. The more sensitive had always to be on their guard.
The deeper kinds of intimacy and mutual reliance were precarious and
rare. In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit.
People were constantly "getting together," but they never really got
there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in
company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these
strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For
everyone searched his neighbor's eyes for the image of himself, and
never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.

Another perplexing fact about the religious life of the Other Men at the
time of my visit was this. Though all were devout, and blasphemy was
regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of
blasphemous commercialism. Men assumed that the flavor of deity could be
bought for all eternity with money or with ritual. Further, the God whom
they worshipped with the superb and heart-searching language of an
earlier age was now conceived either as a just but jealous employer or
as an indulgent parent, or else as sheer physical energy. The crowning
vulgarity was the conviction that in no earlier age had religion been so
widespread and so enlightened. It was almost universally agreed that the
profound teachings of the prophetic era were only now being understood
in the sense in which they had originally been intended by the prophets
themselves. Contemporary writers and broadcasters claimed to be
re-interpreting the scriptures to suit the enlightened religious needs
of an age which called itself the Age of Scientific Religion. Now behind
all the complacency which characterized the civilization of the Other
Men before the outbreak of the war I had often detected a vague
restlessness and anxiety. Of course for the most part people went about
their affairs with the same absorbed and self-satisfied interest as on
my own planet. They were far too busy making a living, marrying, rearing
families, trying to get the better of one another, to spare time for
conscious doubt about the aim of life. Yet they had often the air of one
who has forgotten some very important thing and is racking his brains to
recover it, or of an aging preacher who uses the old stirring phrases
without clear apprehension of their significance. Increasingly I
suspected that this race, in spite of all its triumphs, was now living
on the great ideas of its past, mouthing concepts that it no longer had
the sensibility to understand, paying verbal homage to ideals which it
could no longer sincerely will, and behaving within a system of
institutions many of which could only be worked successfully by minds of
a slightly finer temper. These institutions, I suspected, must have been
created by a race endowed not only with much greater intelligence, but
with a much stronger and more comprehensive capacity for community than
was now possible on the Other Earth. They seemed to be based on the
assumption that men were on the whole kindly, reasonable and
self-disciplined.

I had often questioned Bvalltu on this subject, but he had always turned
my question aside. It will be remembered that, though I had access to
all his thoughts so long as he did not positively wish to withhold them,
he could always, if he made a special effort, think privately. I had
long suspected that he was keeping something from me, when at last he
told me the strange and tragic facts.

It was a few days after the bombardment of the metropolis of his
country. Through Bvalltu's eyes and the goggles of his gas-mask I saw
the results of that bombardment. We had missed the horror itself, but
had attempted to return to the city to play some part in the rescue
work. Little could be done. So great was the heat still radiated from
the city's incandescent heart, that we could not penetrate beyond the
first suburb. Even there, the streets were obliterated, choked with
fallen buildings. Human bodies, crushed and charred, projected here and
there from masses of tumbled masonry. Most of the population was hidden
under the ruins. In the open spaces many lay gassed. Salvage parties
impotently wandered. Between the smoke-clouds the Other Sun occasionally
appeared, and even a daytime star.

After clambering among the ruins for some time, seeking vainly to give
help, Bvalltu sat down. The devastation round about us seemed to "loosen
his tongue," if I may use such a phrase to express a sudden frankness in
his thinking toward myself. I had said something to the effect that a
future age would look back on all this madness and destruction with
amazement. He sighed through his gas-mask, and said, "My unhappy race
has probably now doomed itself irrevocably." I expostulated; for though
ours was about the fortieth city to be destroyed, there would surely
some day be a recovery, and the race would at last pass through this
crisis and go forward from strength to strength. Bvalltu then told me of
the strange matters which, he said, he had often intended to tell me,
but somehow he had always shunned doing so. Though many scientists and
students of the contemporary world-society had now some vague suspicion
of the truth, it was clearly known only to himself and a few others.

The species, he said, was apparently subject to strange and
long-drawn-out fluctuations of nature, fluctuations which lasted for
some twenty thousand years. All races in all climates seemed to manifest
this vast rhythm of the spirit, and to suffer it simultaneously. Its
cause was unknown. Though it seemed to be due to an influence affecting
the whole planet at once, perhaps it actually radiated from a single
starting point, but spread rapidly into all lands. Very recently an
advanced scientist had suggested that it might be due to variations in
the intensity of "cosmic rays." Geological evidence had established that
such a fluctuation of cosmical radiation did occur, caused perhaps by
variations in a neighboring cluster of young stars. It was still
doubtful whether the psychological rhythm and the astronomical rhythm
coincided, but many facts pointed to the conclusion that when the rays
were more violent the human spirit declined.

Bvalltu was not convinced by this story. On the whole he inclined to the
opinion that the rhythmical waxing and waning of human mentality was due
to causes nearer home. Whatever the true explanation, it was almost
certain that a high degree of civilization had been attained many times
in the past, and that some potent influence had over and over again
damped down the mental vigor of the human race. In the troughs of these
vast waves Other Man sank to a state of mental and spiritual dullness
more abject than anything which my own race had ever known since it
awoke from the subhuman. But at the wave's crest man's intellectual
power, moral integrity, and spiritual insight seem to have risen to a
pitch that we should regard as superhuman.

Again and again the race would emerge from savagery, and pass through
barbarian culture into a phase of worldwide brilliance and sensibility.
Whole populations would conceive simultaneously an ever-increasing
capacity for generosity, self-knowledge, self-discipline, for
dispassionate and penetrating thought and uncontaminated religious
feeling.

Consequently within a few centuries the whole world would blossom with
free and happy societies. Average human beings would attain an
unprecedented clarity of mind, and by massed action do away with all
grave social injustices and private cruelties. Subsequent generations,
inherently sound, and blessed with a favorable environment, would create
a world-wide Utopia of awakened beings.

Presently a general loosening of fiber would set in. The golden age
would be followed by a silver age. Living on the achievements of the
past, the leaders of thought would lose themselves in a jungle of
subtlety, or fall exhausted into mere slovenliness. At the same time
moral sensibility would decline. Men would become on the whole less
sincere, less self-searching, less sensitive to the needs of others, in
fact less capable of community. Social machinery, which had worked well
so long as citizens attained a certain level of humanity, would be
dislocated by injustice and corruption. Tyrants and tyrannical
oligarchies would set about destroying liberty. Hate-mad submerged
classes would give them good excuse. Little by little, though the
material benefits of civilization might smolder on for centuries, the
flame of the spirit would die down into a mere flicker in a few isolated
individuals. Then would come sheer barbarism, followed by the trough of
almost sub-human savagery.

On the whole there seemed to have been a higher achievement on the more
recent crests of the wave than on those of the "geological" past. So at
least some anthropologists persuaded themselves. It was confidently
believed that the present apex of civilization was the most brilliant of
all, that its best was as yet to come, and that by means of its unique
scientific knowledge it would discover how to preserve the mentality of
the race from a recurrence of deterioration.

The present condition of the species was certainly exceptional. In no
earlier recorded cycle had science and mechanization advanced to such
lengths. So far as could be inferred from the fragmentary relics of the
previous cycle, mechanical invention had never passed beyond the crude
machinery known in our own mid-nineteenth century. The still earlier
cycles, it was believed, stagnated at even earlier stages in their
industrial revolutions.

Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the
best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the
crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men,
of course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more
civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and
mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been
such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific
civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more
comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and
a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man could
know more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreover,
increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local
idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the
gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily
overlooked that the human constitution, though strengthened by improved
conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain
disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In
particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and
more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon
outnumber even the churches. But the cynics were only jesters. It was
almost universally agreed that, in spite of wars and economic troubles
and social upheavals, all was now well, and the future would be better.

The truth, said Bvalltu, was almost certainly otherwise. There was, as I
had suspected, unmistakable evidence that the average of intelligence
and of moral integrity throughout the world had declined; and they would
probably continue to do so. Already the race was living on its past. All
the great seminal ideas of the modern world had been conceived
centuries ago. Since then, world-changing applications of these ideas
had indeed been made; but none of these sensational inventions had
depended on the extreme kind of penetrating the whole course of thought
in an earlier age. Recently there had been, Bvalltu admitted, a spate of
revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories, but not one of them,
he said, contained any really novel principle. They were all
re-combinations of familiar principles. Scientific method, invented some
centuries ago, was so fertile a technique that it might well continue to
yield rich fruit for centuries to come even in the hands of workers
incapable of any high degree of originality.

But it was not in the field of science so much as in moral and practical
activity that the deterioration of mental caliber was most evident. I
myself, with Bvalltu's aid, had learnt to appreciate to some extent the
literature of that amazing period, many centuries earlier, when every
country seemed to blossom with art, philosophy and religion; when people
after people had changed its whole social and political order so as to
secure a measure of freedom and prosperity to all men; when state after
state had courageously disarmed, risking destruction but reaping peace
and prosperity; when police forces were disbanded, prisons turned into
libraries or colleges; when weapons and even locks and keys came to be
known only as museum pieces; when the four great established priesthoods
of the world had exposed their own mysteries, given their wealth to the
poor, and led the triumphant campaign for community; or had taken to
agriculture, handicrafts, teaching, as befitted humble supporters of the
new priestless, faithless, Godless religion of world-wide community and
inarticulate worship. After some five hundred years locks and keys,
weapons and doctrines, began to return. The golden age left behind it
only a lovely and incredible tradition, and a set of principles which,
though now sadly misconceived, were still the best influences in a
distraught world.

Those scientists who attributed mental deterioration to the increase of
cosmic rays affirmed that if the race had discovered science many
centuries earlier, when it had still before it the period of greatest
vitality, all would have been well. It would soon have mastered the
social problems which industrial civilization entails. It would have
created not merely a "mediaeval" but a highly mechanized Utopia. It
would almost certainly have discovered how to cope with the excess of
cosmic rays and prevent deterioration. But science had come too late.
Bvalltu, on the other hand, suspected that deterioration was due to some
factor in human nature itself. He was inclined to believe that it was a
consequence of civilization, that in changing the whole environment of
the human species, seemingly for the better, science had unwittingly
brought about a state of affairs hostile to spiritual vigor. He did not
pretend to know whether the disaster was caused by the increase of
artificial food, or the increased nervous strain of modern conditions,
or interference with natural selection, or the softer upbringing of
children, or to some other cause. Perhaps it should be attributed to
none of these comparatively recent influences; for evidence did suggest
that deterioration had set in at the very beginning of the scientific
age, if not even earlier. It might be that some mysterious factor in the
conditions of the golden age itself had started the rot. It might even
be, he suggested, that genuine community generated its own poison, that
the young human being, brought up in a perfected society, in a veritable
"city of God" on earth, must inevitably revolt toward moral and
intellectual laziness, toward romantic individualism and sheer
devilment; and that once this disposition had taken root, science and a
mechanized civilization had augmented the spiritual decay.

Shortly before I left the Other Earth a geologist discovered a fossil
diagram of a very complicated radio set. It appeared to be a
lithographic plate which had been made some ten million years earlier.
The highly developed society which produced it had left no other trace.
This find was a shock to the intelligent world; but the comforting view
was spread abroad that some non-human and less hardy species had long
ago attained a brief flicker of civilization. It was agreed that man,
once he had reached such a height of culture, would never have fallen
from it.

In Bvalltu's view, man had climbed approximately to the same height time
after time, only to be undone by some hidden consequence of his own
achievement.

When Bvalltu propounded this theory, among the ruins of his native city,
I suggested that some time, if not this time, man would successfully
pass this critical point in his career. Bvalltu then spoke of another
matter which seemed to indicate that we were witnessing the final act of
this long-drawn-out and repetitive drama. It was known to scientists
that, owing to the weak gravitational hold of their world, the
atmosphere, already scant, was steadily deceasing. Sooner or later
humanity would have to face the problem of stopping this constant
leakage of precious oxygen. Hitherto life had successfully adapted
itself to the progressive rarefaction of atmosphere, but the human
physique had already reached the limit of adaptability in this respect.
If the loss were not soon checked, the race would inevitably decline.
The only hope was that some means to deal with the atmospheric problem
would be discovered before the onset of the next age of barbarism. There
had only been a slight possibility that this would be achieved. This
slender hope the war had destroyed by setting the clock of scientific
research back for a century just at the time when human nature itself
was deteriorating and might never again be able to tackle so difficult a
problem.

The thought of the disaster which almost certainly lay in wait for the
Other Men threw me into a horror of doubt about the universe in which
such a thing could happen. That a whole world of intelligent beings
could be destroyed was not an unfamiliar idea to me; but there is a
great difference between an abstract possibility and a concrete and
inescapable danger. On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by
the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in
the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving
must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope,
this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that
there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe,
or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds.
That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must
of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which
the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely
vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be
sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star
Maker.

Not so to Bvalltu. "Even if the powers destroy us," he said, "who are
we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker
that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our
strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme
inconceivable to us, and excellent." But I protested, "What theme could
justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how
otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we
judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that
he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds." Bvalltu
was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among
the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind,
"If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you
forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What
has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good
word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even
if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest.
Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little
figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so,
it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right."

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, "And if
after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt
into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of
ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and
this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no
Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it
only the sharp tang and savor of existence. But to call it this is to
say little."



CHAPTER IV

I TRAVEL AGAIN

I MUST have spent several years on the Other Earth, a period far longer
than I intended when I first encountered one of its peasants trudging
through the fields. Often I longed to be at home again. I used to wonder
with painful anxiety how those dear to me were faring, and what changes
I should discover if I were ever to return. It was surprising to me that
in spite of my novel and crowded experiences on the Other Earth thoughts
of home should continue to be so insistent. It seemed but a moment since
I was sitting on the hill looking at the lights of our suburb. Yet
several years had passed. The children would be altered almost beyond
recognition. Their mother? How would she have fared?

Bvalltu was partly responsible for my long spell on the Other Earth. He
would not hear of my leaving till we had each attained a real
understanding of the other's world. I constantly stimulated his
imagination to picture as clearly as possible the life of my own planet,
and he had discovered in it much the same medley of the splendid and the
ironical as I had discovered in his. In fact he was far from agreeing
with me that his world was on the whole the more grotesque.

The call to impart information was not the only consideration that bound
me to Bvalltu. I had come to feel a very strong friendship for him. In
the early days of our partnership there had sometimes been strains.
Though we were both civilized human beings, who tried always to behave
with courtesy and generosity, our extreme intimacy did sometimes fatigue
us. I used, for instance, to find his passion for the gustatory fine art
of his world very wearisome. He would sit by the hour passing his
sensitive fingers over the impregnated cords to seize the taste
sequences that had for him such great subtlety of form and symbolism. I
was at first intrigued, then aesthetically stirred; but in spite of his
patient help I was never at this early stage able to enter fully and
spontaneously into the aesthetic of taste. Sooner or later I was
fatigued or bored. Then again, I was impatient of his periodic need for
sleep. Since I was disembodied, I myself felt no such need. I could, of
course, disengage myself from Bvalltu and roam the world alone; but I
was often exasperated by the necessity of breaking off the day's
interesting experiences merely in order to afford my host's body time to
recuperate. Bvalltu, for his part, at least in the early days of our
partnership, was inclined to resent my power of watching his dreams. For
though, while awake, he could withdraw his thoughts from my observation,
asleep he was helpless. Naturally I very soon learned to refrain from
exercising this power; and he, on his side, as our intimacy developed
into mutual respect, no longer cherished this privacy so strictly. In
time each of us came to feel that to taste the flavor of life in
isolation from the other was to miss half its richness and subtlety.
Neither could entirely trust his own judgment or his own motives unless
the other were present to offer relentless though friendly criticism.

We hit upon a plan for satisfying at once our friendship, his interest
in my world, and my own longing for home. Why should we not somehow
contrive to visit my planet together? I had traveled thence; why should
we not both travel thither? After a spell on my planet, we could proceed
upon the larger venture, again together.

For this end we had to attack two very different tasks. The technique of
interstellar travel, which I had achieved only by accident and in a very
haphazard manner, must now be thoroughly mastered. Also we must somehow
locate my native planetary system in the astronomical maps of the Other
Men.

This geographical, or rather cosmographical, problem proved insoluble.
Do what I would, I could provide no data for the orientation. The
attempt, however, led us to an amazing, and for me a terrifying
discovery. I had traveled not only through space but through time
itself. In the first place, it appeared that, in the very advanced
astronomy of the Other Men, stars as mature as the Other Sun and as my
own Sun were rare. Yet in terrestrial astronomy this type of star was
known to be the commonest of all throughout the galaxy. How could this
be? Then I made another perplexing discovery. The galaxy as known to the
Other Astronomers proved to be strikingly different from my recollection
of the galaxy as known to our own astronomers. According to the Other
Men the great star-system was much less flattened than we observe it to
be. Our astronomers tell us that it is like a circular biscuit five
times as wide as it is thick. In their view it was more like a bun. I
myself had often been struck by the width and indefiniteness of the
Milky Way in the sky of the Other Earth. I had been surprised, too, that
the Other Astronomers believed the galaxy to contain much gaseous matter
not yet condensed into stars. To our astronomers it seemed to be almost
wholly stellar.

Had I then traveled unwittingly much further than I had supposed, and
actually entered some other and younger galaxy? Perhaps in my period of
darkness, when the rubies and amethysts and diamonds of the sky had all
vanished, I had actually sped across intergalactic space. This seemed at
first the only explanation, but certain facts forced us to discard it in
favor of one even stranger.

Comparison of the astronomy of the Other Men with my fragmentary
recollection of our own astronomy convinced me that the whole cosmos of
galaxies known to them differed from the whole cosmos of galaxies known
to us. The average form of the galaxies was much more rotund and much
more gaseous, in fact much more primitive, for them than for us.

Moreover, in the sky of the Other Earth several galaxies were so near as
to be prominent smudges of light even for the naked eye. And astronomers
had shown that many of these so-called "universes" were much closer to
the home "universe" than the nearest known in our astronomy.

The truth that now flashed on Bvalltu and me was indeed bewildering.
Everything pointed to the fact that I had somehow traveled up the river
of time and landed myself at a date in the remote past, when the great
majority of the stars were still young. The startling nearness of so
many galaxies in the astronomy of the Other Men could be explained on
the theory of the "expanding universe." Well I knew that this dramatic
theory was but tentative and very far from satisfactory; but at least
here was one more striking bit of evidence to suggest that it must be in
some sense true. In early epochs the galaxies would of course be
congested together. There could be no doubt that I had been transported
to a world which had reached the human stage very long before my native
planet had been plucked from the sun's womb.

The full realization of my temporal remoteness from my home reminded me
of a fact, or at least a probability, which, oddly enough, I had long
ago forgotten. Presumably I was dead. I now desperately craved to be
home again. Home was all the while so vivid, so near. Even though its
distance was to be counted in parsecs and in aeons, it was always at
hand. Surely, if I could only wake, I should find myself there on our
hill-top again. But there was no waking. Through Bvalltu's eyes I was
studying star-maps and pages of outlandish script. When he looked up, I
saw standing opposite us a caricature of a human being, with a frog-like
face that was scarcely a face at all, and with the thorax of a
pouter-pigeon, naked save for a greenish down. Red silk knickers crowned
the spindle shanks that were enclosed in green silk stockings. This
creature, which, to the terrestrial eye, was simply a monster, passed on
the Other Earth as a young and beautiful woman. And I myself, observing
her through Bvalltu's benevolent eyes, recognized her as indeed
beautiful. To a mind habituated to the Other Earth her features and her
every gesture spoke of intelligence and wit. Clearly, if I could admire
such a woman, I myself must have changed.

It would be tedious to tell of the experiments by which we acquired and
perfected the art of controlled flight through interstellar space.
Suffice it that, after many adventures, we learned to soar up from the
planet whenever we wished, and to direct our course, by mere acts of
volition, hither and thither among the stars. We seemed to have much
greater facility and accuracy when we worked together than when either
ventured into space by himself. Our community of mind seemed to
strengthen us even for spatial locomotion.

It was a very strange experience to find oneself in the depth of space,
surrounded only by darkness and the stars, yet to be all the while in
close personal contact with an unseen companion. As the dazzling lamps
of heaven flashed past us, we would think to one another about our
experiences, or debate our plans, or share our memories of our native
worlds. Sometimes we used my language, sometimes his. Sometimes we
needed no words at all, but merely shared the flow of imagery in our two
minds.

The sport of disembodied flight among the stars must surely be the most
exhilarating of all athletic exercises. It was not without danger; but
its danger, as we soon discovered, was psychological, not physical. In
our bodiless state, collision with celestial objects mattered little.
Sometimes, in the early stages of our adventure, we plunged by accident
headlong into a star. Its interior would, of course, be inconceivably
hot, but we experienced merely brilliance.

The psychological dangers of the sport were grave. We soon discovered
that disheartenment, mental fatigue, fear, all tended to reduce our
powers of movement. More than once we found ourselves immobile in space,
like a derelict ship on the ocean; and such was the fear roused by this
plight that there was no possibility of moving till, having experienced
the whole gamut of despair, we passed through indifference and on into
philosophic calm.

A still graver danger, but one which trapped us only once, was mental
conflict. A serious discord of purpose over our future plans reduced us
not only to immobility but to terrifying mental disorder. Our
perceptions became confused. Hallucinations tricked us. The power of
coherent thought vanished. After a spell of delirium, filled with an
overwhelming sense of impending annihilation, we found ourselves back on
the Other Earth; Bvalltu in his own body, lying in bed as he had left
it, I once more a disembodied view-point floating somewhere over the
planet's surface. Both were in a state of insane terror, from which we
took long to recover. Months passed before we renewed our partnership
and our adventure.

Long afterwards we learned the explanation of this painful incident.
Seemingly we had attained such a deep mental accord that, when conflict
arose, it was more like dissociation within a single mind than discord
between two separate individuals. Hence its serious consequences.

As our skill in disembodied flight increased, we found intense pleasure
in sweeping hither and thither among the stars. We tasted the delights
at once of skating and of flight. Time after time, for sheer joy, we
traced huge figures-of-eight in and out around the two partners of a
"double star." Sometimes we stayed motionless for long periods to watch
at close quarters the waxing and waning of a variable. Often we plunged
into a congested cluster, and slid amongst its suns like a car gliding
among the lights of a city. Often we skimmed over billowy and palely
luminous surfaces of gas, or among feathery shreds and prominences; or
plunged into mist, to find ourselves in a world of featureless dawn
light. Sometimes, without warning, dark continents of dust engulfed us,
blotting out the universe. Once, as we were traversing a populous region
of the heaven, a star suddenly blazed into exaggerated splendor,
becoming a "nova." As it was apparently surrounded by a cloud of
non-luminous gas, we actually saw the expanding sphere of light which
was radiated by the star's explosion. Traveling outward at light's
speed, it was visible by reflection from the surrounding gas, so that it
appeared like a swelling balloon of light, fading as it spread.

These were but a few of the stellar spectacles that delighted us while
we easefully skated, as on swallow wings, hither